Belief vs. Faith, Religion vs. Sex

Kid seems remarkably enlightened under the circumstances, mate. If it was me getting my head kicked in at kindegarten everyday I’d be less interested in gazing into your eyes, seeking your spiritual heart or trusting your faith and more focussed on the bloody boxing lessons frankly - or at least on you loaning me a sock with a cue ball in it.
This idealised child is as unconvincing as your idealised view of Jesus, the Bible and faith itself - and has as little basis in reality.

[chuckling heartily] “...loaning me a sock with a cue ball in it” speaks to me, windar. I too had a violent streak at one time. Certainly you appreciate the courage and resourcefulness of such a choice. One who is willing to fearlessly address the challenges of life is to be praised. I just hope you wouldn’t hit him in the head.

Faith : Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.

Good point, windar. But a belief without logical proof or material evidence can still be completely logical.

I hesitated before reading End of Faith because I didn’t want my views and understandings skewed by someone else’s thoughts. I am very comfortable with my beliefs and need no further convincing about religion and its reasons to exist or not.

I am comfortable with my beliefs as well. Today. I was also when I considered myself a Christian, a Zen aficionado and an agnostic. Things change. Experience and dealing with adversity is mind expanding and can change perceptions.

I get confused when someone compares the bible with a factual book like a dictionary. The bible is not an account of history or of humanity or its struggles with survival, it’s based on superstition and unproven supposed accounts of incredible acts of nature. I wonder what sort of account we would be reading in your bible if the earth would have gone through a very active volcanic era…

Apparently you expect me to defend the Bible and have missed my earlier commentary about its relevance. It is no more “my” Bible than it is yours. Please do not confuse faith in God with the belief that the Bible is the unerring word of God. They are completely different. My use of the dictionary as a comparison was to argue that, as with the Bible, it simply represents the knowledge of a point in time by whoever wrote it. One has only to review a dictionary from the 1800’s to understand that.

Don’t you hate that science god…err guy?

In my mind, science and religion are not only not incompatible, they are essential to each other. Science deals with facts; religion is concerned only with values. Science purifies religion. Without values, science is undependable.

“The major difference between Sufis and ‘believers’ is that belief is conviction, certainty without proof, while Sufi knowledge is factual. This is often disputed by theologians because they regularly confuse knowledge with belief. This is easy to demonstrate. If I know that it is ten past ten in the morning, or that there is a fly on the wall, it is absolutely unnecessary, lunatic, even, to describe this as a belief. On the other hand, the people who believe that something is true do not know it in anything like the same way. Why? Because if they knew it as a positive, objective fact they would not manifest any emotion about it: neither would they be so keen to make others believe. All human experience shows that it is only things about which there is doubt which are believed in this characteristic manner. Facts, true ones, are not subject to either emotion or proselytization. The theologically-centered people, then, are not wrong or deluded, they are feebly informed as to the difference between, say, ‘I know that this is a pencil’, and ‘I know that there are spiritual beings, because I have felt that it is true.’” (p.245)

“Displacement activity, sometimes called ‘exchange symptoms’, forms a most important part of human behavior. As an example, people who claim that they have no interest in metaphysics are often over-reacting against just such a curiosity. On the other hand, people who fevently claim that they are deeply concerned about such things are seldom in the right state to profit from them. Their excitement is used as a means of preventing them from going further. Their anxiety paralyses them: but this may well be inwardly intentional. You can see this, on a very ordinary level, when you look at agitated believers in all sorts of cults and systems. Because they ‘have belief’ they do not believe in learning. They use belief, in fact, to prevent learning. This is partly because the urgent ‘desire to learn’ is a low-level, emotional activity, a form of pleasurable agitation, a displacement. ‘Believers’, too, hold onto beliefs and do not allow them to be modified easily, certainly not by experience, because they really seek a systematic formula to make themselves feel stable. The space in their minds is there for system, not for truth. It is such people who imagine that there has been a great change in them when they merely exchange one belief-system for another. Then are not believers in the sense understood by a genuine belief-system, merely temporarily stabilised.” (p.250)